‘I imagine most journalists think they have a novel in them,’says Harris. ‘But there’s definitely not a natural, guaranteed rule that a good journalist will be a good novelist.

‘Being a journalist might help in getting published, but at the end of the day, getting published is not easy. It’s quite a brutal process. Getting an agent is hard enough, then selling the book is even harder.

‘There must be something to the book. But the public will have the final decision – and that’s fairly definitive.”

And then, of course, there are reviews. How will poacher Harris cope as gamekeeper? A damning review of Freedland’s first book, for example, was published in The Times after being spiked by The Guardian, his employers, for being too ‘awkward”.

‘It’s a weird process being reviewed, and being interviewed, as you’re just not used to being on that end of the thing,’says Harris.

‘A review is something you’ve worked hard for, and it’s nerve-wracking. You realise what they have been going through, while you’ve been interviewing or reviewing them.”

Harris, 36, left City University in 1996, working for Reuters, Associated Press, The Daily Telegraph, and The Observer. It was while at the Telegraph he covered the war his novel is based on.

‘It was an amazing experience, but slightly traumatic,’he says. ‘It left memories with me, and had an impactâ€¦when I left Africa to come to Britain I decided I wanted to process it through fiction.

‘It’s the old maxim – write what you know.”

A far-from definitive list of journalists-cum-novelists (news organisation then novel)